


Fall Short

by BloodyAbattoir



Series: Manifest Destiny [5]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:02:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21908641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BloodyAbattoir/pseuds/BloodyAbattoir
Summary: Your writing never manifests in the way you want it to.
Series: Manifest Destiny [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1376083





	Fall Short

You sit in your room, a scant three days before Christmas, screaming through desperately flying fingers, knowing you are too late to change anything, and yet, still hoping against hope that you will. You look back on what you had written in August, a perfect little happy ending tied off with a bow, all details neatly accounted for. It hadn't happened nearly as well as you'd hoped it would. None of it came true, not nearly as closely as you'd hoped it would. 

Sure, you'd lost nearly fifteen pounds, but it was nowhere enough to put you back under your goal weight. Yes, your ex was texting you more, and while the stream of conversation ebbed and flowed, it was still more regular than it had been before Thanksgiving, and rarely would a day go by without your phone chiming to announce another message from him. Those were the minor details, and they'd worked themselves reasonably well, you thought. 

What bothered you, however, was the fact that the major details in your plot had unraveled, near misses on each key factor. In fact, the near misses were so close that they were fucking painful, to know that it all could have worked out, if not for some planet or another being out of alignment. You've settled into a state of numbness as you work your way through your tasks, one by one, ever slower and slower. You are in a trance, unable to weep, unable to exalt in joy, unable to even crawl out of bed for more than a few minutes some days. 

You've woven a careful web of lies, statements of how healthy you were, how much you were doing with your life, how much better that you'd gotten. It is a patchwork of half truths and fabrications, one that he has swallowed hook, line, and sinker. 

But you realize that you cannot keep up the farce for long, even if your only contact was through text. He'd almost always known when something was wrong, when you'd lied to him. You didn't want to take that risk, but at the same time, you were loathe to undo all your hard work. Thread by thread, you begin to unravel your carefully spun stories at the edges, just enough to show you were vulnerable. You dangle a shred of your heart in front of him, a tiny scrap of what was left of you, the real you, under the masks you showed to the world around you, fully expecting to be rejected. 

Instead, the dynamic between the two of you changes. He's become sweeter somehow, talks to you more, just to ask if you're alright, if you've been eating, how your day went. It is something even your current partner, if you could call him such, neglected to do. You were a ghost, a phantom wrapped in skin, a background character in a supporting role in the scenes that made up everyone else's life, to everyone but him. You craved the attention, basked in it like a cat would a patch of sun filtering through a window, and damn near melted each time he expressed any sort of care, any sort of concern. He always did have a savior complex, a need to fix the broken things. 

And yet, being broken is exactly what drove you apart, too far gone to heal. This time, you swore up and down, this time, if you got a second chance, you'd right all your wrongs, do everything right that you failed at the last time. You cannot help but feel that there is something greater than you listening in when you say this, perhaps malevolent, perhaps benevolent, perhaps indifferent. You are waiting for the other shoe to drop in your numbed out state of being, and you feel that this entity, whatever it is, just may give you the chance to prove yourself, if only to laugh at your failure, as you will, inevitably, fail. After all, no matter how much you pretend to be a god, you are only human. 

As the minutes tick by, and you grow closer to Christmas Eve, you feel a sinking in your heart. None of this is worth it anymore. Happy endings aren't real, and even if they were you'd never get one. Villains don't get happy endings, and a villain is what you were, the one that will be beaten down time and time again to prop up some hero or another, make them feel like they're superior. Every story needs a villain, and if that must be you, so be it. 


End file.
